Mortgagee Powers Rhetoric

This article addresses the rhetoric of land law's interpretive community at the time of, and following, the House of Lords' decision in Boland . It is argued, contrary to the views of other commentators, that the decision was not strongly motivated by a concern to see social justice done between commercial lenders and wives but, rather, was a sensible and socially realistic application of clear statutory provisions understood within the context of land law orthodoxy. Furthermore, decisions following Boland which have been said to have sapped its strength also cohere comfortably within that community's stable rhetoric. Consequently, it cannot be argued that proportionality in human rights law requires a return to the supposed 'high point' of Boland – when considered carefully, the evidence, both from Boland itself and from land law's wider interpretive community, shows that such a high point did not exist.     

Politics and the Adoption of Legislative Television: An Analysis of the U.S. House Vote on C-SPAN

The present study extends the work of Crain and Goff (1988) by examining the political determinants of the earliest decision to adopt legislative television on a permanent basis at the national level in the United States. Data on legislator and district characteristics are used to explain the 1977 vote to adopt C-SPAN coverage of proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives. Logit regression results suggest that length of service and extremity of political views/ideologies had clear and significant effects on politicians' votes concerning the adoption of legislative television. As with Crain and Goff (1988), these measures capture some element of legislator self-interest.     

The importance of modeling spatial spillovers in?public?choice analysis

It is frequently assumed that regional observations on local government behavior, voters, regional taxes, etc. can be analyzed using ordinary least-squares (OLS) methods. We discuss spatial regression models in empirical studies of public choice issues using impacts arising from population migration on the provision of county-level government services as an illustration. Spatial regressions allow an examination of the direct and indirect (spatial spillover) effects which taken together determine the total impact (on the dependent variable) arising from a change in the explanatory variables. This decomposition should be quite useful in empirical public choice studies.